Perhaps holding back is the one suffering we could have avoided

As it is quite obvious, this site has received little to no attention in the past nine months. Truthfully, it received only a little more in the several months before that too.

There are easy reasons for this—finishing up a Master’s program and a demanding work schedule top the list. But beyond that has been a growing dissatisfaction with the kind of writing that I have done here. There are a few pieces of which I am quite proud, but most have felt incomplete at best—the germ of an idea and perhaps its seedling, but without its maturity. However, with the completion of my degree, I’ve been able to revive my intellectual life and to reflect on what comes next.

Thus, today is the official start of a new project that I began working on a few months ago—the Long-Line Release. The goal of the LLR will be to publish one long(ish) form piece per month, on an eclectic variety of issues. It will be intentionally directed toward more sustained, thorough treatments of subjects such as fly fishing, hiking and backpacking, religion, culture, public education, business and finance, book reviews, scientific issues, history, environmental concerns, and more. Some will be esoteric and only of interest to a narrow group. Others will be more broad. Basically, I plan to write about things that I find engaging and worthy of something more.

That new start also means that, for the foreseeable future, this project will no longer be updated. I will likely expand or update some of the work that I did here for the LLR, but this site will continue to maintain the status quo of the last several months. I am grateful for those of you who have read my work, commented, or otherwise engaged what I’ve done here. For that, I am truly grateful.

The Long-Line Release is officially up and running, and the first piece is live. I encourage you to join me over there.

From far a light, maybe a hill ranch
remote and unvisited, beams on the horizon
when we pass; then it is gone.
For the rest of our lives that far place
waits; it’s an increment, one more
hollow that slips by out there, almost
a gift, an acquaintance taken away.

Still, beyond all ranches the deep
night waits, breathing when we breathe,
always ready to offer new light,
over and over, so long as we search
for something so faint most people
won’t know, even when it is found.

Spring ought to be coming soon to Northwest Montana—in theory, at least. Today, daytime temperatures topped out at 6° F, and we’re already on the way to another night, in a string of them, below zero. In other words, we’re having a proper winter.

There has been a lot of chatter lately about winter being only a temporary state of being, a rest from the joy of summer. I suppose that for a species that emerged from equatorial Africa, it makes sense to see winter as the dead time between summers. Of course, we’ve been wandering the rest of the globe for sixty millennia—give or take—, so you might think we’d have grown accustomed to a little cold weather by now. I for one can attest that, after being raised in the sauna of the Deep South, it takes only a few short months for a sunny day in the single digits to feel balmy. Though, soon enough 40° F will feel much colder than today, and the cycle will repeat itself as the homeostatic properties of the human body do their work.

There is, as always, the larger perspective beyond our limited human vision. Astrophysicists tell us that the universe is expanding, and, at some point 10^10120 years from now—give or take—, the universe will reach maximum entropy. Like spreading a bed of coals apart from one another and into the snow, all possibility for life will more or less have ended. In that sense, proper winters like these are balmy days for the universe as well. But enough with existential dread this season. Yes, we all eventually die and the flame of the material world goes out, but there are more important things to ponder on a warm day in March.

—Fishing, for example. Due to the onerous finale of my Master’s program, which will gratefully be completed in the next three to four weeks, I’ve had to limit my outdoor pursuits. In fact, “limit” is a gracious word for the paltry amount of time I’ve spent breathing deeply in the cold winter air. But, the one thing that has kept me going has been winter fishing and fly tying. I have a fly box full of pink stuff for the Mo’ and other local tailwaters, and I’m already starting in on ‘hopper patterns and ants for late summer fishing. I guess I’m no one to judge those whose thoughts have turned to spring—I haven’t slept outside but once since October, and all I can think about these days is the April ice-off and returning to the world outside as the snow slowly melts away.

If winter is a state of universal being, then so is summer—each in their season. When my classes finally end and I can finally return to working only a more-than-full-time job, it will be spring no matter what the weather station reports. In the meantime, I’ll be getting ready.

With the government shut down, the research and science programs in Glacier ground to a halt. Despite being at a critical juncture for the season—the brief, erratic window before the weather makes getting up high difficult and dangerous—, park scientists were forced to set aside their research until Congress could resolve its differences. When they were allowed to go back to work a week and a half ago, it appeared that the October snows would soon close the season with incomplete data sets.

But the unseasonably-warm weather continued to hold out hope. So, needing a night out, I volunteered to conduct a field survey at Gunsight Pass.

The plan was simple enough: Hike into Sperry after work, camp, hike to Gunsight in the morning, and out that afternoon the way I came.

I started an hour later than I had hoped—packing is never as simple as I pretend it is when planning at the last minute. But the sunset on the way up the Sperry trail made the headlamp-hiking worth it.

I got in later than I wanted to—3,400 feet of elevation gained seemed less daunting when I began scheming, and my hasty plan didn’t account for either the gap of nearly two months since my last serious trip or several extra pounds of survey equipment. But I still managed to get a full nine hours of sleep that night, and I woke refreshed and ready, with frost on the inside of my shelter.

Below me, Lake McDonald was covered in a morning haze thick enough to obscure all but the top of Howe Ridge, and the Apgar Mountains—the entire range in view—rose from the clouds in shades of blue and pink. I lingered longer than I should have. But the morning was beautiful, and I needed the opportunity to enjoy it.